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Meta's Muse Tops 5 Million Downloads as Stock Posts Best Month Since 2022

Meta's AI assistant Muse passed 5 million US downloads within about three weeks of launch, according to Sensor Tower, while Meta shares closed September up 27 percent, their best month since 2022.

AI News Feed · 2026-10-01 06:44

Sensor Tower Senior Insights Analyst Kara Lee projected the 5 million figure. The market intelligence firm said Muse reached the milestone considerably faster than rival assistants, which took 56, 103 and 492 days respectively for ChatGPT, Grok and Claude.

Meta launched Muse in the United States about three weeks ago and it soon overtook ChatGPT as the top free app in the US App Store, according to 9to5Mac. Sensor Tower said the app has held the top spot in the US store for 12 consecutive days and also leads in Canada. Muse is Meta's agentic AI assistant, able to browse the web and carry out tasks on a user's behalf, including sending emails, shopping, filling out forms and booking travel. It is available on iOS and Android, but only in the US and Canada. Sensor Tower noted that Claude and Grok were iOS-exclusive during their first five days.

Sensor Tower placed the launch in a broader context, estimating that only 23 apps have reached more than 5 million US downloads within 22 days of release. About 85 percent of those are mobile games, including Fortnite, Pokemon GO and Candy Crush. Only three non-gaming apps are on the list: Disney+, HBO Max and Threads, which drew roughly 20 million, 18 million and 14 million downloads respectively in that window.

Advertising appears to have contributed to the pace. Sensor Tower said Meta began to ramp advertising spending for Muse on Wednesday, September 16, 2026, as downloads spiked 73 percent day over day. Muse has received the largest share of Meta's house ads, accounting for up to 50 percent of daily house impressions over the two weeks from September 14 to September 27, as Facebook and WhatsApp ceded share of impressions during the same period. Muse also ranked among the top 15 brands by advertising impressions in the US during the week of September 21 through September 27, the firm said.

On the market side, Meta shares closed at $725.18 on Wednesday, a 27 percent increase from the $572.34 closing price at the end of August, CNBC reported, making it the stock's best month since 2022. The last time Meta had a bigger month was November 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT. September was also the fifth-best month on record for Meta, and the stock outperformed all of its megacap peers and the Nasdaq, which gained almost 2 percent over the same stretch.

Meta held its annual Connect conference for developers in September, where chief executive Mark Zuckerberg described Muse as a "centerpiece" of the company's product and business strategy and unveiled new hardware including the Muse Charm AI pendant. Rivals are pursuing the same territory: OpenAI debuted its Dots agent tools on Tuesday. Meta this week hired MongoDB CEO CJ Desai to head a new unit called Meta Enterprise Platform, and it debuted Muse for Small Business agent technologies.

"The enterprise AI solutions market, including cloud capacity, is expected to exceed $1trn by 2028, and we think Meta's consumer data and communications apps could give Meta's advantages for AI enterprise sales to consumer-focused companies," BofA Global Research analysts wrote in a Monday note. "We would expect distribution of Meta's model APIs on leading hyperscaler platforms."